Products & Services
One man’s trash is another man’s problem
By Charlie on 14 April 2009
GLOBAL – We recently wrote about some things we discovered about Nokia’s attitude towards spreading environmentally sensitive thinking across the company and suppliers. These discoveries were prompted by an article on a phone buy-back scheme we had highlighted and which was called out by some of our colleagues.
What ensued was a fascinating travel through the problems of e-waste and finding out why Nokia does not like to promote buy-back and reuse schemes. Below, we discuss some issues of e-waste and the reasons behind Nokia’s stance. We hope that it helps you understand a problem that is basically invisible to most of us in Europe and North America.
It’s so simple, right?
We’ve written a ton of articles about recycling efforts by Nokia, the spread of recycling centers all over the world, awareness programs, surveys, a poll, and even a video. One thing that comes up is that everyone says, “yo, why don’t you guys promote the REUSE of phones, reuse is better than recycle, isn’t it?”
We wondered the same thing. Why wasn’t Nokia supporting buy-back companies, charities or programs.
Well, turns out that it’s not that simple.
When it is past reuse
When a manufacturer takes in an electronic device for recycling, it is sent to a proper facility where workers are protected from any potential toxins, toxic components are handled safely, and all of the device is disassembled and properly processed. It is really the only way for a manufacturer to guarantee that a device at the end of its life is properly and safely recycled.
It is true that many devices are indeed reused, passed onto family, friends, or resold in the second-hand market. But the problem is when the device is beyond its life span. What Nokia finds is that many times buy-back schemes end up relocating the phone to a market that buys them as scrap material. More often than not, these are markets with no capacity to actually recycle the phone when it is through with it.
That’s not to say that buy-back schemes are bad, but they often end up shifting the disposal to the wrong place, places not prepared to deal with the end of life of a device in a safe way.
Not in our backyard, please
Such markets are well aware of this. Indeed, Nokia got slammed by Ghana when it was discovered that there were many Nokia devices in the nation’s dumps. The problem is that the phones did not get to Ghana through Nokia channels.
And this is not just a problem for Nokia and phone manufacturers, it is a problem for the whole electronics industry.
E-waste overview
E-waste is one of the fastest growing types of waste, potentially tripling in volume over the next five years. The challenge is that almost 75-80 per cent of e-waste goes unaccounted for, some estimate up to 99 per cent. Some national regulatory bodies have tried to put a stop to e-waste. For example, e-waste export is banned in Europe. But the US has no regulation for e-waste export to non-OECD countries. And there is no way to track this stuff, so really no one knows for sure how bad the problem really is.
For the most part, e-waste gets shipped overseas as second-hand goods (a lot of which cannot be reused). This junk then gets sent to unregulated “backyard” operations set up to harvest precious metals (gold, copper, aluminum). In the process, burning and acid baths release highly toxic substances. This causes workplace, water, and soil contamination.
Actions being taken
While this is scary (to us, at least), there are actions that can be taken or are being taken. For example, exports of second-hand devices need to be tested to see if they are still suitable for reuse. Companies need to continue phasing-out toxic substances. Also, corporations need to continue to improve products’ designs, such as to improve disassembly and recycling. Facilities need to be established for effective and safe recycling in “hotspots,” such as in Ghana, India and China. And, clearly, there also needs to be increased tracking of products at the end of their life.
There are international cross-industry actions, such as the “Basel Convention on the Trans-Boundary Movement of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal” in which Nokia participates via the Mobile Phone Partnership Initiative, established for the management of used and end-of-life mobile phones. Nokia also works with the European Commissioner for the Environment on integrated product policies, which minimize environmental impact of products through analysis of products’ life-cycles.
There is also a promising focus on the life of downstream materials, such as refurbished, reused, and recycled content. And with electronics producers forming partnerships with recycling companies, there’s a hope that this problem can come under some sort of control.
So, did you know all this?
All this opened our eyes, and we are now a bit wary of re-use programs that ship phones to Africa or China or such. We are starting to see that proper recycling via the manufacturer is indeed the safest and most environmentally sound way to dispose of old phones (and other electronics). Or at least, it is one that the manufacturer can be totally sure about. That is why Nokia has set up recycling take-back schemes in 85 countries.
What do you think? Has this changed your thoughts on recycling and reuse? Can we be more conscientious of reuse and make it work well? Should we be a bit stricter with well-meaning buy-back programs?
[Celia Peterson and Susan Smith, from Nokia's environment communications team, contributed (heavily) to this article.]
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Tags | e-waste, green, recycle, Reduce, Reuse, sustainability
April 15th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
While I do admire Nokia for it’s environmental efforts and especially raising these issues as topics here on this site, it really hasn’t been a secret that e-waste is dumped to poorer regions. And even if we think we’ve “recycled” your gadgets, or “returned” our ink cartridge for “re-filling” they might still end up somewhere overseas where people in the slums manually, laboriously are disintegrating our old stuff.
But, even if we could get rid of the toxins and plastics in manufacturing new stuff, maybe we should also think about just limiting our continuous need for new stuff?
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charlie Reply:
April 15th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
@msav, You’re right, and that’s why we promote sending devices back to proper recycling places.
As for limiting the need for new stuff, it’s an intriguing idea if we can slow down our consumption of gadgets and all.
Have you seen The Story of Stuff?
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
Reply
msav Reply:
April 15th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
@charlie, thanks for the link and reply.
Here’s also an interesting documentary:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3058533428492266222
It’s based on this book:
http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
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December 1st, 2009 at 1:38 am
The article is getting into some depth on this issue but its even a much deeper equation.
The most important point missed here is the environmental impact in creating a new phone, not just disposing of a used phone. The eWaste side is nasty but one could easily argue the creation of a new phone is even nastier. The precious metals alone required for single new phone result in the generation of 3 tons of toxic mining waste. Yes, that little smidgen of gold and other precious metals in your phone are largely come by from extremely nasty mining operations far from site. Not to mention the plastics, PCBs, etc. So, if you can put a used phone back into secondary use for just one cycle it offsets that mining waste for at least one cycle, along with all of the energy, plastics, etc, involved in the creation of a new phone.
If you now figure that data in the balance of the environmental equation it becomes a much different question. Basel (BAN) and others don’t like the notion of US/Western eWaste going into the 3rd world and posioning thier people and landfills. No one does. But its a bury-your-head-in-the-sand approach to say that used phone from the US/Western should not be collected, resold to secondary markets, or recycled because some of them might end up in 3rd world country smelting barrels. There are nearly a billion phones sitting in drawers in the US today already and another 150M joining them annually. Eventually these will go into the landfills here and create a toxic mess if we don’t otherwise collect them and recycle them. The way you keep used phones out of smelting barrels in Ghana is to never ship a used phone to a secondary market for less than its gold value (roughly 50 cents) because there will be no profit in it for metals reclamation.
The environment benfits most when:
- Any phone with a secondary market is given a second life.
- Any phone that is actually end-of-life is processed exclusively through one of the handful of responsible smelters/recyclers on the planet. (BTW, we don’t have one here in the US and we need one)
Advocating that used US/Western phones shouldn’t be collected or resold in secondary markets assumes they will sit benignly in the drawer forever, and that those secondary markets aren’t going to buy a newly created phone if they can’t get the used one.
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